Total newbie here, and reading the above leaves me confused. I've been using patchwork less than 24 hours. My second or third post was marked as a #fork by patchwork (in some status line attached to that post) which at the time I assumed meant that I successfully started a new sub-conversation.

Now, I'm not so sure. Why would patchwork tell me I have a fork? If this is bad, shouldn't it tell me "that's bad", and suggest how to resolve it? Or auto-resolve it? After using patchwork for maybe an hour, I need to already worry about arcana?

Hey @Linas thanks for the question!

This is a language clash :-D Latest patchwork has a new design implemented. If you click the reply button to a specific post, then patchwork interprets this as "I want to create a new subconversation thread which is directly responding to this particular post". If your comment is a reply to the overall thread and conversation as started by the first opening post, then the design of the interface wants you to write your reply in the bottom reply box.

So, what you have surfaced is a semantic confusion are forking. This is for sure influenced by the early participants of this system being quite technical and so using language such as, please fork the thread, which actually is not a universal concept....

so, for example, this reply is "off-topic" in relation to the opening post of this conversation and so in other cases we might chose to "fork" the conversation to make a new topic specifically to do with this... so... lets do that and we can discuss better semantics there!